How wellness makes us sick
+ the Food Babe is back, for some reason...
Dr Jonathan Stea, a clinical psychologist and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary, took part in a TikTok-based research project in 2021.
The goal: analyze 1,000 videos that included the hashtag #mentalhealth in an attempt to identify misleading claims or misinformation.
These were no minor influencers. Collectively, the videos had been viewed over 1 billion times. The team Stea was on discovered that while two-thirds contained“some useful information,” a full third were misleading.
As Stea writes in The Walrus,
Some of the misleading ones parroted anti-psychiatry tropes, such as the idea that medications aren’t helpful and “are for profit only.” Alarmingly, the misleading videos also received more views, likes, comments, and shares than the ones we classified as useful. Our findings are consistent with other studies showing that TikTok videos contain high amounts of misinformation about more specific health topics, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, diabetes, prostate cancer, and COVID-19.
Stea maintains an active and influential social media presence. He’s often trolled as a “big pharma shill,” which is ironic given that he doesn’t have the ability to prescribe drugs.
Yet he’s passionate about sharing sound medical advice. Navigating the challenges of being a kind and empathic therapist while pushing back against online trolls is no small task. As Stea told me in August, he can receive up to 100 DMs and comments a day, some threatening his life.
All this for sticking up for evidence-based mental health practices. Sadly, online spaces facilitate limitless delusions, like the idea that someone who’s watched a few Jordan Peterson videos can remotely diagnose others, or the trope that all antidepressants are dangerous when in fact they save (or make better) countless lives.
The problem: noise and false claims can drive people who need help away from seeking it. An unstated but very real danger of “wellness”: influencers spreading misinformation keeps people away from the medical attention they need.
As Stea frames it:
We are at a point in human history where we have access to the best available information at our fingertips, and yet it doesn’t lead to better-informed health decisions, because that information is drowned out by a rival proliferation of emotionally charged fake science news, conspiracies, alternative facts, and social media echo chambers.
You can read more about this topic in his recent book, Mind the Science: Saving your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry.
All a process
Vani Hari, the “Food Babe” seemed lost to obscurity. Her days of claiming that saying the word “Nazi” damages the structure of water and flu shots are a tool of genocide seemed like a bad memory we could have finally forgotten.
Yet she’s been resurrected as part of RFK Jr’s “MAHA” campaign, leading the charge in a congressional panel yelling about a few food dyes instead of doing the hard work of addressing actual public health concerns.
As Dr Andrea Love recently wrote, her “activism” comes at a cost: an extensive line of processed foodstuffs that she markets by fear-mongering around other people’s processed foodstuffs.
As always: watch what they say, then watch what they sell.
Ketamine blues
While I’m hopeful for the potential therapeutic effects of psychedelics (and am a proponent for national decriminalization), I’ve been writing about the rushed FDA trials of products like esketamine for years.
This deep dive into the shaky science behind psychedelics delivers a pertinent warning: if you’re seeking FDA approval, don’t tell trial participants that they’re “part of a movement.” That’s not how good science works.
Social health
I’ve long been critical of wellness influencers that pin bad health outcomes on single ingredients or lifestyle choices without addressing the social determinants of health, which experts believe account for somewhere between 30-55% of all health outcomes.
Wellness influencers aren’t often interested in “solutions” they can’t monetize. Public agencies serve a different role. The Oregon Health Plan, which provides health coverage for 1.4M Oregonians, is launching a new initiative aimed at helping low-income residents, backed by $1B from federal Medicaid:
The housing benefits could include up to six months of utility and rent assistance, as well as medically necessary home modifications, like wheelchair ramps, heavy-duty cleaning or pest control. The initiative aims to keep those residents housed during serious medical events, such as hospitalizations or injuries that prevent them from working.
Public health isn’t sexy or salable. What it is, when done well, is effective. And that speaks volumes about what we really need to make America healthy “again.”
Beware the halo
The term “health halo” takes a cue from the cognitive bias known as the halo effect, the idea that something is good based on a single trait. In this case, consumer’s eyes will be drawn to a food product marketed as “high in protein” even if it’s not different than a candy bar from a nutrition perspective.
Another is “vitamin fortified,” writes the NY Times. And unfortunately, the marketing promises are getting a boost in the courts. Buyer beware.
Last year, three plaintiffs filed a class action complaint against PepsiCo, arguing that it had created a “deceptive health halo” around its Gatorade protein bars, including by marketing the bars as science-backed tools to “help muscles rebuild.” A federal judge ruled in August that the lawsuit against PepsiCo could proceed.
And, finally…
One question I’ve fielded constantly since launching Conspirituality: what real-world problems do wellness influencers actually cause? Considering the podcast was founded to push back on anti-vax misinformation, that answer is clear: reduced rates of vaccination.
For the third straight year, kindergarten vaccination rates have dropped. Researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention crunched the data and found a disturbing trend.
The researchers found that compared with approximated national coverage levels across all reported vaccines for the 2019–2020 (95 percent) and 2022–2023 (93 percent) school years, coverage dropped for the 2023–2024 school year, ranging from 92.3 percent for DTaP to 92.7 percent for MMR. Compared with the 2022–2023 (3.0 percent) and 2021–2022 school years (2.6 percent), exemptions increased to 3.3 percent.
Tragically, if we don’t reverse course soon, this problem will be truly endemic.